Traveling Companions

“I can’t imagine that he’s going to interject the Mormon religion into the way he governs.”

“…you don’t have Jesus running against someone else. You have Obama running against Romney.”

These are not the words of a Washington insider, trying to convince evangelicals that Mitt can still be their guy. These are direct quotes from Pat Robertson on his own soap box, The 700 Club. Evangelicals are now being forced to deal with the fact that the President of the United States of America is not a religious official or a church appointee.

Don’t get me wrong: I want Romney to loose badly. I want his defeat to be monumental, to crush the current leadership of the GOP and drag them back to the middle where we can actually get something done for the American people. I know that he is a man who has built a career on bad public policy, and being more then willing to follow money and votes in his political stances. I know that his church teaches things about US and world history that make my stomach churn, and I fear for the country if he injects any of those teachings into educational policy. But, Like Robertson, I don’t think he’ll do that. I think that Mitt Romney will keep his faith private more than any other Republican President since Roosevelt.

“People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology,” Romney said. “Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview.”

So, it is in 2012, 32 years after Reagan’s embrace of the so-called Religious Right that the new GOP is forced to admit that American politics is bigger and more important than arguments about the person of Jesus, as long as we agree on the personhood of Chase, ” a leading global financial services firm”.

Nothing could have put their platform into to clearer focus than having to accept a unitarian from a sci-fi religion as their nominee in order to insure that corporations are allowed to spend more than individuals on elections and never have to pay a reasonable amount in federal taxes. Meanwhile, the poor go unfed, then sick go untreated, and the weak go unpsoken for. The GOP rejection of the actual message of Jesus couldn’t get much more complete. Maybe now we can start arguing about things that politics can actually fix.